Rawk and Roll

Another crazy week...

If you haven't already, you still have a chance to enter Robert Swartwood's Hint Fiction contest. Kinda like flash, but 25 words or less. Ha! General Electric couldn't have made fiction more efficient! Robert is getting some great press on this deal as well, stop by and check it out. Cool literary prizes, and special guest judge Stewart O'Nan.

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After all of the drama 2009 has brought so far (including Amazon wins with Kindle2, Amazon loses with selective search results, #queryfail, #agentfail, and, believe it or not, #failfail), it's been a pretty quiet week (at least in my neck of the desert). 

I did just learn that local author Vicki Pettersson will be the speaker at the May Las Vegas writer's meetup, which should be cool. I scanned her bio, it sounds like she is a wild-idea-turns-into-writing-career example, and I would imagine has some good stories and/or insight on the industry.

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I am still behind on reading blogs this week...work has been a big steaming pile of no fun, and lots of little roadblocks keep popping up. One of them is Outlook, or, as I've gotten to know it: Look out! Its RSS reader sucks, and I'm done with it. I spent an hour yesterday porting all of my feeds over to Google Reader; hopefully it will actually provide updates that are correct (there are a couple that it would just totally ignore, and I thought there just weren't updates...hopefully that's done, and I can get caught up with ya'll again!). 

I'm curious what everyone else uses for RSS readers?

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The girls went shopping today, and I rawked out on my novel...rawk==about 2,000 words for me these days. Which puts me at about 3,000 for the week, which does not rawk at all. 

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What's cooler than getting a box from Amazon? Getting a box from Amazon full of skeleton parts. In my house, Halloween planning starts, oh...about January. Is that bad? That seems bad.

Who-o-o Watches the Watchmen?

I watches the Watchmen!

As I've mentioned, I never read The Watchmen--my first thought was that it had something to do with The Avengers (shows how little I know about either). Neither of my kids were interested (in retrospect, a lucky thing for me), so Amy and I did something we never, ever do: we went to a movie alone. It was like an alternate reality.

Anyway, the movie...I thought it was great. Not awesome, not the pinnacle of the genre, but for either a comic-based movie OR a dramatic/action flick, it was pretty damn good in both categories. The characters, for the most part, were well-layered--as much as they can be in such a compressed environment. 

<begin spoilers>

There is very little wrong with this story; I think it has some very interesting things to say about society, and a great depth of emotional storytelling and character development. It's also a very refreshing Socratic thought  experiment on the genre: aren't superheroes really just vigilantes in cheesy costumes? Wouldn't people who do that be total outcasts? Wouldn't they have mental problems, emotional issues, and weird incestuous relationships within their little group of superfriends?

I do think that they could have fleshed out Silk Spectre II a bit more; there were a few points where it seemed like she was just there as a storyline pivot point, yet she was so central to the overall story. Ozymandias was a bit thin, too...he was just kind of out there as the guy who is super-smart, super-rich, and super-strong, but never really explained or justified any of that.

But, those are really my only complaints, and they are minor points at that. The other characters were great--especially Rorschach. Rorschach is the kind of character that I think many writers wish they could have brought to life: singular, intelligent, powerful, vulnerable, and, ultimately, broken beyond repair. The Comedian was also great--he was a grade-A motherfucker, somebody that you have no choice but to absolutely loathe, despite his 40-year spot on the "hero" team, and long relationship with the U.S. government. He is, in a not-so-subtle meditation on the nature of good guy/bad-guy, the worst parts of humanity all in one basket, but that's what made him interesting. He is a reflection of the darker parts of society; in his words: the American Dream come true.

It also featured two things that no other comic movie has had (that I'm aware of): softcore full-nude, pelvic-thrusting sex scenes, and extended full frontal male nudity, albeit the (presumably) CGI-rendered horse-member of Dr. "Papa Smurf" Manhattan, which, in one scene, swings to and fro as he walks across the room. Very brave for American cinema (which is a sad commentary on American cinema, I'm afraid).

I put the Watchmen compilation in my Paperbackswap queue, but I think I'm like 238th in line...which is fine, I wouldn't read it for a while anyway. Also, some things I've learned in researching the Watchmen saga: Alan Moore, the writer, is a pretty eccentric guy. He's so pissed at the studios, apparently he is giving all of his proceeds from Watchmen and V for Vendetta to the guy who penned the comics.

</end spoilers>

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Still reading Gilead...there is no way in hell I'm going to hit 50 books this year, but I'm not worried about it...as long as I keep working through my TBR list, I'm happy.

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Still pounding away on my full length Aquarium, although I did take a day off and knock out a 2700 word short story...it's kind of a funny story about a sadistic, murdering marriage counselor, and it's in queue with...someone. I can't remember.

Lazy summer day in March...

What a lazy damn day...my outside thermometer reads 92° F (but it's in direct sunlight...the actual temperature is probably closer to 75° F...but I'll still take it). I sat outside and read about 75 pages of Gilead, and my Malamute took a nap on the cool cement patio next to me. If you live somewhere where it's cold today, just remember this before you throw a shoe at your monitor: in only a few short months it will break 100° here in the Mojave desert, and then it will break 110°, then 115°, and it will stay there until September, and then ramp back down about 10° a month. This is one of two seasons when people actually leave the house in Las Vegas. Weird, huh?

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I won't write until later tonight, but I've had a couple of >2,000 word days in a row on Aquarium, so I'm feeling pretty good about where I'm at. Should break 15k before bed.

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It's been beat to death this past week; so the only thing I'm going to say about the Kindle 2 text-to-speech controversy is this: yes, authors are struggling for cash right now--just like everyone else in the world. No, the Kindle can't replace a professional audiobook. Yes, it's worthy of discussion. All true. But the important thing that Roy Blount doesn't seem to have acknowledged (or realized) is that by taking a hard line stance on this issue and leading the charge to protect the author-members of the Author's Guild from this minor so-tagged threat, he is risking turning the guild (and, by proxy, all professional writers regardless of if they belong to the AG or not) into the puppy-killing protectionists that the internet has twisted the MPAA and RIAA into. Reading as a pastime is tenuous as it is, and current and prospective authors don't really need someone pissing in the pool right now over a minor issue that is looking to get  overblown in another case of the Streisand Effect.

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If you're one of the 1.2 million people who haven't seen this short video about superheroes Piderman and Baman, enjoy in preparation of going to see Watchmen next weekend...

Yes, I Can (Dammit)

Are you a confident or delusional writer?

I was thinking about a friend-of-a-friend the other day; he is a successful entrepreneur and author. Very spiritual and centered (he's a Sikh, which helps) but in a stange balance, is full of himself. But it works for him, and he is a very likable, approachable person...albeit very driven, and very likely to bring himself and/or his business up in conversation. But, to the point of the above link: that's kind of what it takes to be a working writer, isn't it? The ability to be confident when the odds are pretty much stacked against you? I know personally that everything I write feels risky (i.e., how weird is it to sit around and make up other peoples lives, and to write in a flourished way that I don't speak aloud?), but if I lose confidence in what I'm doing, even for a minute, I'll give up and not try.

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Good week of writing...I've been averaging close to 1k every day this week, and over 2k last night; I think I passed 10.5k on Aquarium last night, which made me happy-dance on the way to bed. I'd love to crack 15k this weekend...there are some parts coming up that I really want to see.

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I was never a fan of the comic, but I am kind of excited to see Watchmen when it comes out next week. I think the flaws and humanity of superheroes (a la Spiderman, Wolverine) are really some of the best parts of the story.